Some of the enthusiasm for farmers markets, which are springing up like mushrooms after rain, arises from meeting objects that aren’t mute, because you see the people who grew the produce and know that the places they come from are not far away. This alternative economy feeds people who want to be nourished by stories and connections as well as by food, and it’s growing. Some farmers markets are like boutiques, with little bunches of peas or raspberries displayed and priced like jewels, but I go to an intensely multiethnic mob scene called Heart of the City Farmers Market in which the food, even some of the organic stuff, is pretty cheap and everyone is present, including the homeless, who frequent that space all week anyway, and the locals use the market to make up for the way supermarkets boycott poor neighborhoods. Seeing the thorn scars on the hands of the rose growers there was as big a step in knowing what constitutes my world as realizing that, in this town where it never snows, our tap water is all Sierra snowmelt.
What bothers me about the new mall is its silence, a silence we mostly live in nowadays; what cheers me are the ways people are learning to read the silent histories of objects and choosing the objects that still sing. It’s a small start, but it’s a start.
Locked Horns
[2003]
One day not long ago, I went to see a show of animal skulls at the local science museum. I like skulls. What’s ordinarily hidden under the upholstery of flesh, skin, hair, and other tissue is revealed in bones, the foundations of bodies and, in the size of craniums, perhaps the seat of consciousness, a sort of naked essence of what makes each animal so distinctly itself. The barn-size room was full of them, from the gray throne of an elephant’s head to the yellowish hacksaws of crocodile smiles, all the same raw ingredients of teeth and craniums and eye sockets in spectacularly different proportions corresponding to vision and diet and defense and thought. A wall was covered with a grid of hundreds of sea lion skulls to show their subtle variation, and antlered and horned creatures were lined up on other walls, all the splendor of what in that room seemed apt to call the animal kingdom.
Something I’d missed on a previous visit stopped me cold and made me think for days afterward: a glass case containing four stag skulls, or, rather, two pairs of stag skulls. Each pair of opponents had locked antlers and, unable to disentangle themselves, had died face to face, probably of hunger. The antlers were intricately intertwined like branches of trees that had grown together, and it must have taken only an instant of coincidence when the antlers were angled to fit together like two pieces of a puzzle rather than to clash, a moment when the stags sealed their fates. Such a tangle is fairly common among antlered creatures and some horned ones, such as bighorn sheep, and it’s given rise to the phrase “lock horns,” which I’d never thought about, any more than I had ever thought why a penknife is called a penknife until I came across Wordsworth mentioning that he used one to trim his quill pen.
Language is full of such fossils of the actual and the natural, but what struck me on this visit was the grimness of the stags’ fate and the ease with which it turned to metaphor and to warning. I quickly reviewed my own life to see if any conflicts were so intractable and vowed not to let any so consume me. A lot of people have died of being right, and some of them have taken their opponents with them. Everyone’s encountered bad divorces, noise-obsessed neighbors, monomaniacs who let a grievance take over their lives to the exclusion of everything else, a sort of psychological starvation. It’s not hard to expand this notion to politics, to the locked horns of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Nor is it hard to extend the idea to the way the United States seems lost without an opponent abroad—an evil empire, an axis of evil—with which to lock horns, so that rather than reap a peace dividend since 1989, we’ve watched political leaders look for the familiar embrace of an enemy’s antlers.
But it’s important to remember that it’s a metaphor, that stags are no more prone to divorces than to first-strike missile deployment. Theodor Adorno objected to astrology (or, more specifically, to the astrology column in an American newspaper) because people thought that the stars were about them; better to say that we are about the stars. That is, it’s not that stags are like us but that we are like stags. One of the uses of the natural world is the generation of striking images and actions that let us define and redefine ourselves and connect ourselves to everything else. That the natural world gives rise to metaphors by which we understand ourselves is, I have long thought, one of the most neglected reasons for protecting it and paying attention to it. It’s important to remember too that biological determinism is just bad analogy: all that stuff claiming we are like our primordial selves, therefore we must eat raw food or copulate with those who look this way or act out that way, is just saying that the stars are about us.
The definition is always partial; the door at the far end is always open for something else to happen, for redefinition. “My love is like a red, red rose,” wrote the poet Robert Burns; we assume that there is something about roses—sweetness, redness, delicacy, beauty, ephemerality—that he has in mind and do not picture his sweetheart with thorns, roots, and maybe aphids. Partial resemblance, because metaphor takes us only so far; then we must travel by other means.
The same week I saw the skulls of the stags who’d starved of intractable combat, I went downtown to meet my friend Claire and see the last day of a big show of Yoko Ono’s art. It was a magnificent show, and Ono’s work managed to do all the things the conceptualists of that era most prized, but with a kind of tender hopefulness that wasn’t theirs but hers. At the entrance to the exhibition were two tables, each with two chairs, and the tabletop was a chessboard set with chess pieces, ready to play. But all the chessmen—and the tables, and the chairs, and the board—were white, whiter than the stags’ antlers, than their skulls, than their teeth, pure white. In Ono’s game, your opponent was no longer different from yourself and maybe no longer your opponent. Can you fight yourself? How do you know when you’re winning?
Claire, who has gone around the world doing antinuclear and peace work and now heads Oakland’s Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Center, has many surprising talents, and it turned out that she is an avid chess player. I am not, and I was tired, but that was all to the good, because she was delighted that it took only three moves for me to mistake her rook for mine and move it against her—at which point the game was over, we had unhooked antlers, and Ono had firmly suggested that difference is negligible and conflict avoidable, in this artwork that was about remaking the games and metaphors for war into a playful merging. Further in the exhibition was documentation of Ono’s billboards and placards from the Vietnam War era, which said things like “The War Is Over If You Want It.” Ono makes it clear not only that we could disengage from conflict but also that with open imagination we could transform it into something else—perhaps into love, a word that crops up all over her work. Stags are stags, but chess doesn’t have to be war. Neither does war.
9
CITY AT THE END OF THE WORLD
The Orbits of Earthly Bodies
[2003]
“I live in the city but I dream of moving to the country at least once a week.” This thought is expressed in our mix of sepia-toned photos and plain-spoken text. Black text is silk-screened on a white background; the frames are black-painted wood. 14–4420873 Catalog/Internet only $149.
Pottery Barn Holiday 2002 catalog, p. 71
Each of the past several summers, I’ve spent a month or two at a friend’s small house in rural New Mexico. Every year, I’d come back to the city joking that I wasn’t sure I was closer to nature, but I was definitely closer to my car. Really, it depends on how you define nature. In the country, there’s more wildlife to be seen—though this place surrounded by cattle ranches was not so prolifically populated as many far more suburbanized places I know, where the deer come down and eat the tulips (or, even more thrilling, the mountain lions eat the cocker spaniels).
Around the New Mex
ico house, coyotes sometimes howled at night; vultures, ravens, and swallows all had their appointed rites from dawn to dusk; and last summer a vivid violet-blue bird I eventually pinned down as a male blue grosbeak arrived like a minor hallucination. Most of all, there was the changing light and sky. Without lifting my head from the pillow, I could watch the summer sun rise in the northeast near where the constellation Cassiopeia made her regular nighttime appearance. I watched the transition from sunset to dusk every evening; the one time I went to a movie instead, I sat there thinking, “I’m missing the show! I’m missing the show!” With views to the horizon and dark, dark nights, the sun, the moon, and the stars lived with me, or I with them, and with the lightning and the wonderful cloud operas that passed by. That was glorious.
But my own life was strictly unnatural. Everything practical I did involved getting into a car, because there wasn’t a newspaper, a stamp, or a bottle of milk for sale for many miles. It would have taken me a full day to walk to the nearest grocery store. So I drove there, and drove to the houses of my friends, aunts, and uncles, to hikes in places less restrictive than the ranchlands, to everything. Out there in the little house on the car-alarm-free prairie, I had a great sense of cosmic time and a certain kind of slowing down—until it came time to hit the highway at seventy miles an hour, and that time came often.
Driving a whole hell of a lot is the unspoken foundation of most rural life in America, as well as a lot of wilderness adventuring (a backpack trip of a hundred miles begins with a single parking spot?). We talk about transportation as though the question is whether you drive a Yukon or a hybrid, but the question could be whether you drive, and if so, how often. I know people who really went back to the land, grew their own food, made staying home their business, ranchers whose work is really “out there”; but most people who claim to be rural have just made the countryside into a suburb, from which they commute to their real communities, jobs, research, and resources.
Ed Marston, publisher emeritus of the great environmental newspaper High Country News, once remarked that the West won’t be destroyed by ranching, mining, or logging, but by ten-acre ranchettes. And those ranchettes seem to preserve the frontier individualism of every-nuclear-unit-for-itself; they’re generally antithetical to the ways in which community and density consolidate resources. The urbanist Mike Davis talks of “public luxury”—the shared libraries, pools, parks, transit of urban life—as the way to sustain a decent quality of life that’s not predicated on global inequality.
The “new urbanism” can be a solution when it is really about public luxury and pedestrian space, not about dressing up suburbs like Disney’s Main Street USA. The old urbanism was a solution before we really had a problem. Today, most of the United States is designed to make driving a necessity, turning those who don’t or can’t into shut-ins, dependents, and second-class citizens. As my own neighborhood went from working-class African American to middle-class white, it too became much more car-dependent. A lot of people seemed to exit their houses only to get into their cars, depriving themselves of the expansive sense of home that pedestrian urbanism gives you, or the democratic social space that’s created by coexisting with strangers from, as they say, all walks of life. Watching this transformation taught me that urbanism and suburbia are defined as much by the way you perceive and engage your time and space as by where you live. And it made me wonder if New York City isn’t, in a few key respects, the most natural and democratic space in America, one where stockbrokers and janitors daily coexist in the same space and much of the travel doesn’t involve any machines whatsoever.
I’ve had the rare luxury of living, with rustic intermissions, in the heart of a genuine pedestrian-scale city since I was a teenager, and though the house by the creek might have been natural habitat for a blue grosbeak, the city might be mine. Scratch pedestrian-scale; call it human-scale, since humans are pedestrians when not fitted with vehicular prosthetics.
And in this city with wild edges, I can and do walk to the beach and the hilltops (from which I can see the peaks of five counties, and where blackberries, miner’s lettuce, and a few other wild comestibles grow). Sometimes I think that the intermittent stroll of shopping, people-watching, and errand-running is a pleasantly degenerate form of hunting and gathering, that the city with its dangers and invitations and supplies is more like a primordial wilderness than a predator-free parkland where one leaves only footprints and takes only pictures.
Really, it’s about how you define nature. I think we have tended to define nature as things to look at, and we think we’re natural when we’re looking at nature, however unnatural our own circumstances at the time. If you think of yourself as a species, the question arises of what your natural habitat is: it should be a place where you can forage, where your body is at home, where your scale is adequate, where your rites and sustenance are situated. And then, of course, cities host a kind of human biodiversity that delights me. San Francisco is not only one of the most multiethnic places in the world, but one of the most eclectic. The elderly Asian man in a rose-covered picture hat who strolled down my street one day rivaled the blue grosbeak when it came to provoking amazement.
I love wilderness, wildlife, views straight to the horizon, dark nights, the Milky Way, and silence, though I love my large libraries and pedestrian practices too. I wish I could have it all all the time. But we choose, and I think that if we changed the way we define nature and imagined our own bodies as part of it, we might more enthusiastically choose the places of public luxury and human scale, not as a sacrifice but as a kind of sanity. Besides which, I saw a golden eagle in Oakland the other day.
San Francisco
The Metamorphosis
[2003]
San Francisco is bounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by the San Bruno Mountains, a small kingdom whose heights lift you up above the concrete to see the hills, the bay, the sea beyond, with a grid of straight avenues that become lines to the horizon, light shafts, and axes: you always know that there’s a beyond to this city, America’s second most densely urban city, after New York. I’ve been walking it for three decades, since the days when I’d cut school to catch the bus into the city, and now the place is layered with ghosts—of my own life, of the events of my lifetime, and of the histories that unfolded there before. Everything used to be something else. This mutation itself seems to be a definitive condition of the place. Where the Batman Gallery showed avant-garde art by the likes of Bruce Conner in the 1960s, a Starbucks now serves up Frappuccinos; and where the African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane survived into the twenty-first century, a boutique now showcases ironic denim creations and stretchy sweater items. That’s gentrification’s cultural degradation for you, but the longer stretches of metamorphosis get really interesting.
The particular stretch of South of Market where photographer Eadweard Muybridge lived in the 1870s while he was laying the foundations for motion picture technology was, by Jack Kerouac’s time, “the poor grime-bemarked Third Street of lost bums even Negroes so hopeless and long left East and meanings of responsibility and try that now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard.” Third and Howard, not far from downtown’s shopping and financial districts, is now the location for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, across the street from Yerba Buena Center, a strange mix of nonprofit arts and corporate entertainment that was built where the residential hotels of Kerouac’s time stood.
Those hotels were full of the old white guys who’d launched the great dockside strikes and union drives of the era from the 1910s through the 1930s, and when redevelopment came to their neighborhood, they fought the toughest battle in the country against it and won a lot of concessions that, for example, the African American community across town in the Fillmore didn’t. When I was a young punk, this central place where the old men had lived out the ends of their lives or had been evicted to die elsewhere w
as nothing but a vacant lot. Moscone Center, named after the progressive mayor assassinated in 1978, along with gay supervisor Harvey Milk, by ex-cop Dan White, opened in time to host the Democratic convention of 1984; but what would become Yerba Buena Center, to the north, was just a huge expanse of gravel and dirt where we held demonstrations against the Democrats. I still remember watching MDC (whose initials initially stood for Millions of Dead Cops but, as their political education progressed, came to signify Multi-Death Corporations) play there, that summer of my brother David’s War-Chest Tours of the downtown corporations that backed the Democrats and built nukes. The vacant lot is now Yerba Buena Center, a strangely dislocated place with an airportlike atmosphere that only once recovered its soul: when the gallery exhibited Ira Nowinski’s extraordinary No Vacancy photographs of the old men, their homes, their struggle, and the ruins through the years of the redevelopment fight.
Kerouac continued: “and here’s all those Millbrae and San Carlos neat-neck-tied producers and commuters of America and steel civilization rushing by” to catch the train. The commuter train still runs, but the huge Mission Bay railyard that was long the headquarters for America’s first spectacularly corrupt mega-corporation, Southern Pacific, is no more. It was actually a bay, once, a fact preserved, after all the landfill dumping, only in its name, Mission Bay; and it was thus named because Mission Creek emptied into it for all those millennia when Ohlone Indians were paddling their reed boats there, looking for shellfish. Mission Creek was long ago driven underground, but the mission that gave the creek and the bay their names still exists—Kim Novak visited its cemetery in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—in the core of the hipster zone of the Mission District. As for Mission Bay, after being a rail hub, it became a spacious, morose hobo jungle; and now it’s halfway to being a huge biotech campus. Southern Pacific money begat Leland Stanford’s fortune, and that fortune begat Stanford University, which begat Silicon Valley and, as a sort of by-blow, a fair bit of biotechnology, come back as another form of colonization where the railroad Frank Norris described as the “Octopus” once sat.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 36
